Unrealized Democracy and a Posthumanist Art

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One of the significant messages Iain Chambers puts forth in his article Unrealized Democracy and a Posthumanist Art, is the existence of a constant disruption in the language, history, and culture of the Western world brought about by its own mechanisms of globalization, homogenization, and modernity. The difference that diverse culture brings to the western world, through migration, challenges the ideas of equality and acceptance in the historical western view of democracy. What is at stake is how identity is continually being shifted and influenced, through inclusion and exclusion, based on its level of disruption within the current system. Chambers points out that modernity was built on a framework of “inequalities” and that the west’s resistance to difference, but insistence on equality, is contradictory (Chambers 169). I think part of what Chambers is referring to as “Unrealized Democracy” in the title of the article is the sense that the idea of democracy does not mean equality (which it should), and that a sense of citizenship should include a person’s freedom to shape their own future while also being able to provide for themselves. This means that equality and opportunity for all should exist and be recognized, but seems to fall away in the event of things like increasing poverty in an unbalanced economic system. This can be seen in the current global economic situation where certain groups of citizens are so affected that they are not living and are merely getting by. These are consequences which affect identity, change the way in which a person positions themselves within the world view, and keeps equality at a controllable distance along with difference.
In his book, Migrancy, Culture, Identity Iain Chambers discusses...

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...ern world and its resistance to any breach in regard to its long standing framework of identity, and the fact that hybrid culture and globalization are its opposing forces. The inevitable arrival of a seemingly smaller and smaller world, I believe, is edging us closer and closer to Posthumanist ways of thinking, and art in a Posthumanist world is a tool that can be used to show how differences should be thought of as qualities that form each of our identities, as opposed to signifiers that dictate exclusion.

Works Cited

1) Chambers, Iain. "An Impossible Homecoming." Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994.
1-13. Print.

2) Haraway, Donna J, "Situated Knowledges" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, New York: 1991

3) Herbrechter, Stefan. "A Genealogy of Posthumansim." Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 39. Print.

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